The Consolations of Mortality

by Andrew Stark

  Think again of teletransportation. If we are inclined to believe that we wouldn’t survive it—that something, call it a self, disappears and never makes it to Mars—the reason obviously has nothing to do with the fact that there’s a tremendous spatial gap between Earth and Mars. It has to do with the fact that there’s a temporal gap, however small, between the end of our earthly life and the beginning of our Martian life. Parfit reckons that that gap would last about an hour.30 But it could be vanishingly small and we would, many of us, still feel that something had ended on Earth that wasn’t re-created on Mars.

  Interestingly, though, Parfit relies not on temporal but on spatial imagery throughout his discussion. He equates the contents of our mind over the course of our life to a chain. The individual links in that chain represent whatever memories, thoughts, feelings, plans, sensations, and perceptions are on our mind at each successive moment of our existence. Certainly, the link representing the contents of our mind in the final moment before we get vaporized on Earth, and the link representing the contents of our mind in the first moment when we materialize on Mars, are closely connected and similar—as connected and similar as any of our mental contents on Earth itself ever were moment to moment. After all, our entire mind—just as it was on Earth at the instant before it was destroyed—gets re-created on Mars. No question, then, that the Martian version picks up immediately where the Earth version left off. The chain continues, in the way it always has.

  And beyond this, Parfit asks, what else is there? Beyond the contents of the chain’s links, the contents which obviously do make the Earth-Mars transition with no difficulty, there seems to be nothing else to us—nothing that existed on Earth but that might be missing on Mars. There’s no evidence, in particular, of a “deep further fact” as Parfit says—by which he means a bare self—underlying the chain of our minute-by-minute thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions on Earth but that might not have made the move to Mars.

  David Hume, whose view of the self’s nonexistence supports Parfit’s “Buddhist” understanding, said that, try as he might, he could never “catch” a glimpse of any such bare self underlying all the minute-by-minute memories, thoughts, intentions, and sensations that made up his life. All that Hume could see, when he introspected, were those memories, thoughts, intentions, and sensations themselves. He couldn’t see anything beneath them. And so he concluded that there is no such thing as a deep, further self. Hume would have agreed that we survive teletransportation. All there was to him—all there is to us—is the chain.

  The phrase that Parfit uses to describe what the self would be if it existed—a “deep further fact”—is an interesting one. “Deep” and “further” are spatial terms. They encourage us to think of the bare, essential self as something that, if it existed, would lie “deeper and further” beneath our chain of moment-by-moment memories, perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings, containing the chain like a kind of long tray. Given that that’s what the self would be if it existed, and given that no such “deep further fact” is evident, there is—Parfit says—no self. All we are is the chain, whose links represent our moment-by-moment mental contents. And the chain picks up on Mars right where it left off on Earth without missing a beat—or a link.

  My intention is not to take issue with Parfit’s position as a metaphysical matter. Instead, I’m interested in the question—a question he poses but doesn’t in my view adequately answer—as to why it’s so psychologically difficult for many of us to accept that we’d survive our teletransportation. My suggestion is that Parfit’s image of our mental contents, all our moment-by-moment memories, thoughts, plans, and feelings, as a chain—and the implication that the self, if it existed, would be something “further” and “deeper,” something lying underneath the chain like a tray—is misleading. In day-to-day life, we rarely treat our self on the one hand, and our ongoing mental contents on the other, as if they resembled trays and chains. We don’t treat them as objects overlapping in the same area in space, our self beneath our mental contents. Instead, we tend to polarize our self and our mental contents in time, consigning our self to the future and our mental contents to the past.

  At any given moment, when we look back to our past for a sense of personal continuity, what we have in view is just a series of mental contents. We think of the thoughts, experiences, memories, feelings, sensations, plans, and so forth that made up our life, second by second, up to that moment. We of course can recall only a fraction of them. But anything that we do remember of our past is a type of mental contents: a thought, an emotion, a perception, an experience, a dream, or, more likely, some intricate combination of them. We don’t think of our self, when we look backward, as a bare self persisting through time till the present moment; such a self nowhere appears in view.31 Instead, when we look to our past for a sense of personal continuity, what we have in mind is simply the life we have led to date—all the memories, dreams, experiences, thoughts, feelings, and desires that we have had.

  But when at any given moment we look to the future for a sense of personal continuity what we conceive is, precisely, a bare self, a bare subject, moving ever forward in time. After all, when we look to the future, we can’t tell what our mental contents—our thoughts, perceptions, desires, and sensations—will be over that stretch. They haven’t yet happened. Yes, we can imagine what a fraction of them might be like. We can bring to mind some semblance of next Thursday’s dentist appointment. But in fact we can’t know if that appointment will even happen, the future being full of radical uncertainties, nor that—if it does—our experience of it will be anything like what we envisage.

  And so because we have not yet had the experiences, thoughts, plans, perceptions, sensations, and the like that lie ahead, we think of our future continuity, by default, simply in terms of a bare self moving ever onward in time. That bare self, as we conceive it from the present moment, has no mental contents. Any sense we have of its continuing on in time cannot, then, come from the connections or similarities between its various thoughts, memories, plans, perceptions, and so forth moment by moment: between one link in the chain and the next. It doesn’t yet have any. Instead our bare self can, as we think about it now, continue on into the future only if it persists uninterruptedly in time second by second. That’s all there is to our sense of our continuity into the future. As we look ahead, if there ever comes a moment when that bare self would for some reason cease moving forward, as it would in the instant of vaporization preceding teletransportation, then we die.

  The Buddhist consolation says that if we look at matters in the right way, we will put our self behind us. Thus liberated, we will become simply a flow of related mental contents—sensations, perceptions, experiences—on into the unending future. But in an important way that gets things backward. It is when we look behind us at any given moment that most of us see a flow of mental contents—the perceptions, experiences, and sensations we had in the past. And it’s when we look forward that we unavoidably see only a bare self moving onward into the future. If that self ever stops moving, then we die.

  In fact Parfit’s teletransportation case itself nicely validates this way of looking at the temporal polarization between our self and our mental contents. Think of the post-teletransportation person, the one who materializes on Mars. Looking backward in time, and finding himself possessed of all my mental contents—my memories, beliefs, emotions, sensations, thoughts and so forth—he would think that I have survived, i.e., that he is me. That’s because for him, as for most of us, the sense he has of himself when he looks to the past can come only from his mental contents over time, and he finds that he has all of mine.

  But now think of the pre-teletransportation me here on Earth. Looking forward in time, even though I know that all my memories, plans, attachments, and so forth will be re-created on Mars, I would still equate teletransportation with my annihilation. That’s because for me, as for most of us when we look to the future, the sense I have
of myself continuing on is precisely that of a bare self, a subject, not a chain of memories, plans, attachments, and experiences. And if that subject ever ceases moving forward second by second in time, as it does with teletransportation, it dies. The fact that my mental contents—all my memories, plans, thoughts, dreams, and attachments—might continue on in a Martian equivalent after teletransportation, or more roughly in those who are close to me after my death, ultimately fails to give me a sense of personal continuity on into the future. After all, at whatever moment I occupy, I don’t base my sense of future continuity on my future mental contents, or on the notion that they might bear connections and similarities that link them into a chain. How could I? I haven’t yet had them.32

  According to the Buddhist consolation, my death is nothing because my self is nothing. All there is to me are the memories, desires, perceptions, and thoughts that form links in the chain representing my life. There’s nothing further, nothing deeper—no bare self—to be found underlying them.

  But for those of us who think that something ends with teletransportation—and that something ends with death—our ongoing mental contents don’t lie on top of the bare self as a chain might lie on top of a tray in the same stretch of space. Instead, our self and our mental contents occupy two entirely different stretches in time, the bare self moving on into the future and our mental contents—the memories, perceptions, thoughts, and sensations we have already had—trailing back into the past. That’s why teletransportation, which ends the movement of our bare self on into the future even though all of our mental contents continue on in a replica, is for us just another word for death. And it’s why death, which also ends the movement of our bare self on into the future even if our mental contents continue on in those who were close to us, really does terminate us.33

  In the end the Buddhist consolation loses psychological purchase with me. I cannot go gentle into Parfit’s good night.

  four

  BUCKET LISTS

  The “bucket list”—a list of things to do before you kick the bucket—has come into its own as a literary genre. And it’s a revealing one. Consider the two kinds of items that bucket lists typically feature. First, there is the desire to experience something—usually, it’s something countless others have also experienced—and to know for oneself how it feels. Typical examples: “Attend Loy Krathrong in Thailand.” “Be at Chitzen Itza on December 12, 2012.” “Swim naked in the Caribbean.” “Be at the Feria de Cali Salsa Festival.” “See the Rockettes.” “See Lil Wayne in concert.” “Make the kora around Mt. Kailash in 2014.” “Watch all 100 of [the American Film Institute’s] greatest hits.” “Visit the Kiyomizu temple.” And, on more than one bucket list to be found online, “Meet Lindsay Lohan.”

  Then there is the desire to do something unique, to make a mark, to act on the world, to change it in some singular way. Examples: “Write a book.” “Break or set a world record.” “Be on the cover of a magazine.” “Create a definitive film for every genre in cinema.” “Become a published author.” “Invent a board game.” “Do stand-up comedy.”

  A difference in tone characterizes the way the two kinds of items get expressed. Desires to experience some mass event—or one that many others have undergone—tend to be vivid and concrete. Many concern specific places and dates: “Be at Chitzen Itza on December 12, 2012”; “Make the kora around Mt. Kailash in 2014.” By contrast actions, plans to change the world in some singular way, tend to be recorded abstractly and vaguely. Many seem phoned in. “Write a book.” Good idea—but on what? “Appear on a magazine cover.” Great. But what will you do to earn the honor, precisely? Experiences, almost all of them widely shared, tend to involve the definite article—“the”—indicating a very particularized aim: swim naked in the Caribbean, attend the Feria de Cali Salsa festival. Actions, plans for making an inimitable imprint on the world, commonly incorporate the more indefinite “a”—invent a board game, break a world record.

  Our knowledge that we will die, the existentialist consolation says, is what compels us to create a self. Our finitude, our awareness that our time will soon come to an end, spurs us to get off the couch and out into the world. Otherwise we would never get started. And so we owe our self’s very existence to the fact that we will die.

  Of course, this doesn’t happen automatically. It requires work on our part. To forge a self, the existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich says, we must view death not merely as “the scissors that cuts the thread of our life,” but as “one of those threads that are woven into the design of our existence, from its very beginning to its end.”1 Only by remaining continually aware that we could die at any moment, not simply that we are going to die at some point, will we create a life that is both singular—authentic to our own values because we have no time to waste on anyone else’s—and vivid, one that uses each second to the hilt because time is scarce.2

  But if we are to judge from bucket listers, something goes awry with death’s supposedly galvanizing impetus to self-creation. After all, who if not a bucket lister consciously engages her own death, bringing it into her daily life plans? Bucket listers more than anyone give death its proper existentialist due. They treat the Reaper as a kind of life coach, a whip-cracker urging them ever onward in the project of shaping their lives. By rights, bucket listers should be living embodiments of the existentialist principle, crafting singular, vivid selves.

  And yet what’s vivid in their plans isn’t singular; it’s generic: experiences like Loy Krathrong or the kora around Mt. Kailash. By the same token, what’s singular—“Write a book,” “Appear on a magazine cover”—seems anything but vivid; it seems colorless, bland, washed out. Not the singularity and vividness we expect, or so the existentialist consolation advises, when a full awareness of our finitude compels us to go out and craft an authentic and vibrant self. Something seems off here.

  What does it mean, exactly, to weave your death into your life, to have it with you at every moment as the existentialist consolation recommends? It means recognizing, as Heidegger says, that while your death certainly will happen, you can never know exactly when it will happen. It could strike this afternoon. Then again it might hang back for the next twenty or fifty years.3 That’s why its possibility must be with you at every step of the way—a constant presence.

  And if you do manage to bring your death fully into your life in this “I know I will but not when” way, then, Kierkegaard advises, your mortality will “give [you] energy to live as nothing else does.” Constantly aware of your death—aware that it might happen today, but then again possibly not for years—you will, Kierkegaard says, live “each day as if it were the last and, at the same time, the first in a long life.”4 In other words, death’s ever-present possibility will vitalize you because it will force you to reconcile those two great, but contradictory, morsels of fortune-cookie wisdom: live each day as if it were your last. And today is the first day of the rest of your life. For although you do know that death will happen, you don’t know when. It could be today. But you could just as easily have another twenty or forty years.

  But can you do both things—live each new day as if it were your last, but also as if it were the first day of the rest of your life—at once? Yes. Here’s how it works. And two considerations are key.

  First, look for experiences that require no time to get under way. Even if you were to die tomorrow, there’d still be time to pack another one in. What kind of experiences? Ready-made ones that require no extended action on your part to plan or get going. Like swimming naked in the Caribbean. Or attending a Lil Wayne concert. The great advantage of such generic experiences, experiences that the world presents to you without your having to engineer them, is that if you don’t die tomorrow—if you do die in twenty years—then you can keep on packing them in for as long as you live. Something more unique, by contrast—scaling Everest backward and blindfolded, for example—is not the kind of thing you plan if tomorrow could be your last day. Nor would s
caling Everest backward and blindfolded have been advisable if you happen to live for another twenty years, and you then find yourself looking back wistfully on that glorious moment in the way that Holderlin strategists, say the men from That Championship Season, do on theirs. Only with experiences like meeting Lindsay Lohan or attending the Feria de Cali Salsa Festival would you, when you finally do die, have lived each day right up to the hilt, leading a life that’s as vivid, as colorful, as possible.

  That’s great as a method for taking in the experiences that the world has to offer you. But what about what you have to offer the world, the ways in which you could act on the world to shape it and leave a singular imprint?

  Well, again, remember that you could die either today or in twenty years. The most logical thing to do, then, would be to sketch out some extremely vague, bleached-out, long-range plans. Like “write a book.” Or “invent a board game.” For suppose by some chance that you do happen to live for the next twenty years or so. Then you just might realize such plans, open-ended as they are. But suppose instead that you die tomorrow. Well then, not much would be lost with plans of such a nebulous, long-run nature. Nothing much would have been invested and so there would be no sense of poignant interruption: of having the blade fall just as the goal was in reach. By remaining at the vague, wholly unexecuted “write a book” or “invent a board game” stage, if you do happen to die tomorrow you will leave no half-executed projects, no flailing loose ends of your life, as Ivan Ilych does. Nothing to be finished by others in ways you might not have: nothing that would no longer bear your singular stamp. After all, the whole idea is to make sure everything that matters most to you was singular: done your way.